


Front row seat (tickets are free for hotties)

by FlamingoQueen



Series: Fossilized [6]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (also pronounced "coping mechanisms"), (it's pronounced "coping mechanisms"), Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Bucky hates the Beach Boys, Crack Treated Seriously, Crooning Bucky Barnes, Dinosaurs, Established Relationship, Implied/Referenced Blow Jobs, M/M, Mentions of Elvis Presley Songs, Needless Risk Taking, No one gets hurt, Pine Trees, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, Prehistoric lumberjack super soldiers, Protect the knives, Singing, Steve Rogers Has Issues, This is still Happy Steve after all, Time Travel, To build a raft, Vacation, or does he?, uwu Steve Rogers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-20
Updated: 2019-12-20
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:47:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21868492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: After another few minutes, Steve stops humming, sits up and frowns. “Whatisthat?” he asks. “The one you got stuck in my head. I know it but I can’t place it.”“Monty Python,” Bucky grunts. Thwack goes the rock, not missing a beat. “Lumberjack song.” Thwack. “Seemed appropriate.”“Yeah?”Bucky stands upright with a wince and a groan, leaving the wedge where it is, but letting the rock drop to the ferns at his feet. “Well, I’m a fucking prehistoric lumberjack, Steve, and Iamokay.” He runs a forearm across his brow and turns to face him, careful not to get his feet tangled up in the smaller branches and spent wedges littering his work area.“I’m more than okay,” he adds, no evidence in his voice of anything beyond playful boasting and a hint of breathlessness from exertion, though Steve knows he’s got to be hurting. “I am theshit.”(Or: Steve and Bucky do some prehistoric carpentry.)
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Fossilized [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1489358
Comments: 22
Kudos: 58
Collections: Happy Steve Bingo 2019





	Front row seat (tickets are free for hotties)

**Author's Note:**

> Here's the sixth installment of the series based on my Happy Steve Bingo card! This is for B3: "I caught you singing! Do you take requests?" (Even though the bingo itself is over, I still have my card and my plot, and the series will continue until I get the whole card blacked out. ^_^)

Steve knows full well he ought to either go gather up some more pine cones or else walk the last fifty feet or so to enter the little fern clearing they’ve made into a temporary shelter for the next couple of days of prep work—mostly scoping the area for choice treefalls and stocking up on various edibles and tinder. Thus, double-duty pine cones.

Even as a temporary shelter, it’s pretty nice, up against a flat rock-face with a pine bough platform set up at the base to keep them up off the ground at night. It has nothing on their cave, and it wouldn’t do much at all for them in one of the many rainstorms that roll through. But here, yet again, Bucky’s managed to make them a home of a sort.

And now as Steve’s nearing that home, there are really only the two choices he can make. He can a) go be even more useful than he’s already been, maybe fill the basket up over the brim so that the pine cones tumble off the sides of the heap. Or b) announce his task completed and himself ready to undertake whatever the next task is in Bucky’s construction process.

What he shouldn’t do is set his basket of pine cones down on a soft bit of fern loam and then sit down beside it to listen to Bucky’s singing. But Bucky’s always had a crooner’s voice, and he’s singing a crooner’s song. Crooning it, really. And “Love Me Tender” is just that kind of song, with those kind of lyrics, and—for them, at least—that kind of meaning. “Till the end of time,” indeed.

He doesn’t _have_ to eavesdrop to listen, necessarily. It’s not that Bucky would be upset if Steve walked in on him singing to himself. Bucky never cared about that before the War or during it, and he hadn’t seemed to care after coming back in, either. 

If anything, those rare times he sang to himself in the Tower—at least if it was a happy enough song, and not one of those bleak ones that he insists he identifies with, like “Poor Edward” where the guy has a demon face on the back of his head that drives him mad and takes him to hell…

Well, anyway, those happier songs tended—will tend?—to mark good moods, and therefore times he’s likely to stop singing when discovered, yes, but only so he can get a bit handsy and do his darndest to make some lasting marks on Steve’s neck and shoulders.

And Steve wouldn’t mind some marks on his neck and shoulders, or a whole afternoon spent rolling around in the ferns together, but this is Bucky singing. And Bucky _will_ stop singing if discovered. And even if discovery _is_ followed by a lovely time had by all, Steve just really wants to listen to Bucky being _Bucky_. 

Singing—crooning—without a care in the world. Picking songs that have lyrics he feels but can’t usually manage to express directly, or even indirectly if his audience is too close. Putting his emotions into every note, every syllable of every word, every little improvised riff of humming or foot tapping or finger drumming. Emoting in a way he just can’t in public. Even a very private public. 

Steve isn’t in that clearing with him, and he’d put good odds on Bucky not even being aware that he’s this close to the clearing. But Bucky is serenading him with a love ballad all the same, expressing himself how he feels most comfortable—off on his own without any pressure. Steve’s not dismissing this, and he’s not letting it get snatched away by his presence. He’s going to let Bucky express himself until those words turn into humming, or whistling, or meaningless filler syllables.

Steve’ll wait to hand over his basket of pine cones until after Bucky’s sung his heart out, said his piece, is satisfied he’s gotten this off his chest. And he’ll wait until he’s managed to get his own face to do anything but smile stupidly, his own heart to stop fluttering, his own stomach to settle down, his own eyes to stop watering like leaky faucet.

In the meantime, if Bucky wants to sing that love song on repeat for half an hour, wants to make up new lyrics even closer to their own shared experiences than Presley’s originals, wants to recreate the song so that it truly _is_ meant for just the two of them and no others need apply, well, Steve is more than willing to melt into these ferns in a besotted super-soldier puddle.

* * *

“Took you long enough,” Bucky says, not turning around to greet him, but keeping his attention fixed on the little twig and twine raft mock-up he’s been tinkering with. It’s design five, if the other four in a jumbled pile nearby are any indication.

Steve rubs at the back of his head. Caught or merely suspected? “Well, you know,” he tries. “Pine cones are kind of scattered about by their very nature, and all. Takes, uh, takes time to gather them. You know.”

“Liar.” Bucky smirks at him over his shoulder, his eyes playful. 

Caught, then. Definitely caught. 

“Next time grab yourself a front row seat, punk. Tickets are free for hotties, you know.”

And Steve has to laugh at that. He might just get the neck and shoulders treatment without having interrupted the singing at this rate. “Alright, alright. You caught me,” he says. “Not that I made it challenging.” 

Steve knows he’s only a good liar when he has very good reason to be, and even then, he suspects he’s not as good as he thinks. Nat’s always seen right through him, and Sam. Bucky sure doesn’t fall for it, either, unless he needs to buy the lie to let Steve talk him down off a paranoid ledge. And even then, it doesn’t last a second longer than Bucky needs it to.

He closes the distance between them to take a look over Bucky’s shoulder at the miniature he’s working on. He’d kind of thought of a raft as having logs lined up and rope woven through the lot of them at either end. But in Bucky’s model, the twine’s woven through the twigs all the way down the whole length, under and over each twig, one band of twine for every inch of raft. It leaves a gap between each twig, but that’ll probably be closed up when they have actual logs to work with. 

Steve hopes. It would be terrible to fall through a raft and slip into the water below.

“You think it’ll float if we scale it up?” Steve comes around to sit beside Bucky, holding a hand palm up to accept the raftlet for inspection if Bucky’s done with it for now. “What with the holes in the floorboards?”

Bucky nods and hands it over. “Wood floats, so it doesn’t have to be watertight if it’s a raft, right?” He shrugs. “Anyway, if we need to, we can carve in ditches around the logs for the rope to fit in so the logs are closer together. Kind of hard to carve ditches in twigs for proof of concept, though. Without the twig snapping, anyway.”

Steve wiggles the raftlet to loosen the twine a smidge, and then curls it into a foot-long loop with the twigs running parallel along its length. He looks through the raftlet tube at Bucky. “Is it going to be bendy like this? Prehistoric pool noodle?”

Bucky laughs and snatches the raftlet from him. “Fuck you, Steve,” he says as he flattens it back out. 

“We’ll have perpendicular logs at each end and one in the middle,” he continues. “At least. If not a whole second layer.” Bucky drags his finger along to demonstrate where the additional twigs will go. “I don’t know how floaty this wood is. If it weighs too much, we might not be able to have as many logs. But if it floats high and light in the water, we can have as many stabilizing cross-beam logs as we like. I think.”

“You think.” Steve nods, keeping his face and posture open enough that Bucky will hopefully not interpret it as a challenge when he just means to confirm that it’s conjecture at this point.

“Yeah. I _think_.” Bucky spins the raftlet around on a fingertip like it was a basketball. “It’s not like I’m a master craftsman here.”

Steve nudges him with an elbow and smiles. “I think you’re pretty good at making toy rafts, anyway. Maybe when Santa evolves out of a Christmas grackle, you can be his first elf.”

“I say again, fuck you, Steve.” But Bucky’s grinning as he says it, so that’s not so bad.

Bucky sets the raftlet down and pulls his knees up, wrapping his arms around them and resting his cheek on them. “Did you find any downed trees while you were out picking pine cones? Or was most of your time spent listening to me trying out tunes while twiddling with these twigs?”

“I may have caught the last twenty minutes of your concert,” Steve admits. “But I also found half a dozen trees that would maybe do the trick. And only two had an obvious nest sort of thing going on in the area. The other four seemed pretty sound and uninhabited.”

“Excellent on both counts,” Bucky says. “That means you missed the worst of it.” 

He unfolds from his ball and gets to his feet, using Steve’s shoulder as a stabilizer to aid his rise. “Stash those pine cones in with the rest and let’s go grab ourselves some trees.”

Steve reaches up to keep Bucky’s hand on his shoulder and smiles up at him. “Now I have to know,” he says, “what was the worst of it?”

“Beach Boys,” Bucky mutters with an exaggerated eyeroll of disgust and a shake of his head before he slides his hand out from under Steve’s and walks over to the ledge where they’ve been keeping their meager supplies up off the forest floor.

“Beach Boys, huh.” Steve’s smile widens into a teasing grin. He can only imagine. Bucky hates that whole genre, or at least he claims to. Bucky’s a way better liar than he is. There’s no way to know for sure. “Nice.”

“Yeah, you wish.”

“Aw, come on, hon. Just a taste?”

Bucky pauses, obviously considering it and no doubt about to flip him off and get them moving toward Steve’s fallen trees. But then, to Steve’s surprise, he spins around with a dramatic flare, holding his fuck-off knife in its sheathe like it’s a microphone as he launches into song with some dance moves on top.

Steve’s jaw drops. It’s “Barbara Ann,” but that’s his name instead—Stevie Grant. He’d have paid for that front row seat if this was really in the concert. This is the playful singing from the ‘30s, right down to the twinkling eyes and saucy grin. And not just the opening, but _verses_.

“ _Went to a dance, lookin’ for romance, saw Stevie Grant so I thought I’d take a chance!_ ” Bucky thrusts his metal hand down toward him. “ _Stevie Gra-a-ant! Ta-ake my ha-a-and!_ ” 

Steve’s attempt to accept the hand up and get to his feet is sabotaged by his laughter, but Bucky’s having none of that and hauls him upright anyway, spinning him into a mini-dance as soon as he’s standing, albeit unsteadily.

“ _You’ve got me rockin’ and a-rollin’_ ,” he sings, “ _rockin’ and a-reelin’, Stevie Grant -ant -ant, Steve-Stevie Grant!_ ”

Steve follows along for a bit of the chorus before bringing them to a stop. He’s going to fall over laughing at this rate and drag Bucky down with him. “You are such a dork, Bucky.” His shoulders still shaking, Steve pulls him close and gives the side of his neck a grinning kiss, just under his ear. 

It pretty quickly turns into a bit more, and for once it’s Steve who’s put a stop to the singing and pounced, littering Bucky’s shoulder with love bites and nuzzling at the crook of his neck like that skin and the man wearing it will disappear if he doesn’t keep it under his lips.

“The hell, Steve,” Bucky murmurs into his hair, but he doesn’t object in the slightest if his arms tightening around Steve are any indication. “What’s this about?”

Steve kisses his way up the side of Bucky’s neck and along his jawline, finishing at the side of his mouth, just at the corner of those lips he’d like nothing better than to suck and nibble on for hours. “Your singing, Buck,” Steve says against the edge of his lips. “I love you, too, hon.”

Bucky turns his head to get a solid kiss out of him instead of the almost teasing side kiss and keeps Steve occupied and breathless for several minutes, holding him close with an arm around his waist and grabbing his hair with his free hand.

“Seriously, though.” Steve gives Bucky one last little parting kiss and smiles as he steps back. “For someone who hates the Beach Boys, you do a mean ‘Barbara Ann.’”

Bucky flips him off, but affectionately. “Save it for when I manage to get your surname in the lyrics, you mook,” Bucky mutters.

“Hey, you managed my middle name. That’s something.”

“Yeah, whatever.” Bucky pulls him forward by his shirt and gives his cheek a gruff kiss before pushing him away again. “Time to go collect Jurassic Christmas trees.”

* * *

Steve imagines they’ll be hanging around this “temporary” camp—now looking more like a prehistoric lumber yard than anything else—a lot longer than the couple of days Bucky’d anticipated when they first hiked out here. But he also imagines that’s a good thing, since it means Bucky’s pleased enough with the area and their raft-constructing opportunities to go ahead and settle down a bit.

Not that settling down means anything so relaxing as actually settling down.

Nope. Aside from conceding to a fire for the light they need to keep working after dark, Bucky’s caught that raft bug something fierce and his enthusiasm for the project—“operation: dino-cruise”—has only been exacerbated by getting a good look at the trees Steve found. 

One of them was bigger around than they are tall, and Bucky’d looked tempted by it, but ultimately declared it a bit beyond their means. The other three were only a few feet across—maybe waist-high where they lay on the ground—and therefore “easy.”

Apparently, when Bucky says “easy” in relation to trees that are only half as big around as a super soldier is tall, what he means is that if they apply some Bucky-brand physics and engage in some incredibly reckless stunts, the trees can be broken down into pieces about twenty-odd feet long—long enough to be a pain in the ass, but technically short enough for them to lug back to their lumber yard. 

Ship yard? Raft yard?

It still took effort. Incredible effort. And the physics of breaking down trees into lengths only three or four times taller than they are—without a knife—well, that physics turns out to be about as much fun as the physics of getting a gigantic metal frisbee to return to you after it smacks a Nazi in the head.

Which is to say, it’s not fun in the slightest during the setup phase, when you’re learning the ropes, making the calculations and cursing every few minutes when the shield rolls away on its edge and comes to a stop curve-up so that it’s nearly impossible to get a finger wedged in under it to start over again.

But once you know what you’re doing, once you’re throwing that shield and it’s zipping back to your hand like it knows where home is and home is _you_ … exhilarating. A total rush. The best. Still a workout, but the satisfaction of a good throw and a clean return? There’s nothing like it.

So chopping up trees without a knife comes with its own setup phase, sure. Digging holes in the ground with fire-hardened sticks and copious elbow grease. Dragging nearby boulders into the positions you need. Hacking at tree trunks with hand axes made from chipped rocks until you cut out a wedge your whole arm fits in. Shouldering trees onto rocks and into holes and sometimes both.

But then? Then it gets fun. Stupid-dangerous, sure. Reckless as hell, absolutely. But so fun. Because then it’s time to climb up into a neighboring tree—five stories up, maybe six, no big deal, he’s landed worse—fix the carefully measured dab of mud in your mind as a landing platform, and then fling yourself like a demented monkey from that treetop feet-first onto the trunk of your future raft.

After the first five leaps, they’d gotten it down to an art. A whooping, shrieking, cackling art, accompanied by heated, thrill-fueled makeout sessions and one particular “lunch break” where they took turns being on the menu. By Steve’s math, and not counting time spent as a gasping, moaning menu item, it takes almost a full day to break down one tree, and it’s not a solo task in any way. 

But that just means more time with Steve edging out along a tree limb some ninety feet up while Bucky chants ominously, or whistles circus music, or sends up catcalls about his ass. And it means more time with Bucky hauling him to his feet and groping him thoroughly—inspecting him for injury, he calls it—whenever the trunk finally snaps and Steve goes through it into the fern-lined hole.

And if Steve had wheedled his way into taking more turns at log-diving than Bucky does, so much the better. Bucky doesn’t need the adrenaline rush inherent in doing something so utterly and needlessly dangerous. He gets that rush from watching Steve put himself in danger. And Steve… Steve had had no idea how much he _does_ need this sort of thrill until he got a taste of it again after four months of playing it relatively safe.

And an hour spent trading blow jobs partway through hadn’t hurt their mood, that’s for sure.

He doubts he’ll get another “lunch break” now that they finally have four sections of tree in their lumber yard in the process of being, well, processed, beside the roaring fire. The tasks have been split up again, now that there’s no real need for them to do everything arm-in-arm.

Or maybe it’s just Bucky’s attempt to protect his knives.

Because Steve’s working on carving grooves to Bucky’s specifications along the quartered logs that should cut down on the gaps between the ribs of their raft, and he’s using that stone hand ax to do it while trying not to think longingly of the sharp metal he _could_ be working with. 

And Bucky’s not even using that sharp metal to… Steve supposes it’s enough like splitting off kindling to count as batoning, even if the end result isn’t kindling, but is flat planks of surprisingly even thickness that will be going across their raft to keep it from curling up under them.

Since they’re still not sure how much this dino-pine weighs compared to how well it floats, Bucky’s thinking planks would be structural enough to work while not adding much weight. And his newest raft construction theory puts those on top of the ribs instead of underneath, so Steve’s hoping they’ll actually have a reasonably flat surface to… sit on. 

Or stand on. Or just keep their balance on. Something to keep their footing on the water so they don’t end up _in_ the water and under the raft.

In any case, Bucky’s efforts have made their little lumber yard look like an actual one, with something akin to 2x4s, even if the measurements are no doubt off. And Steve’s efforts have added wood chips that are just this side of too chunky to count as sawdust. Steve feels so accomplished.

He also feels pretty damn privileged to be sitting here in the ferny wood chips with a big, triangular log draped across his lap, a stone hand ax gripped tightly in one fist, and a front row seat to Bucky’s very enhanced ass as he works on his awkward, horizontal batoning project a few feet away.

Bucky has fashioned a series of wooden wedges out of the harder type of pine tree they’ve found using the one fuck-off knife he’s decided—mostly—that they can sacrifice to this raft project. Because somehow using his knife to baton a massive tree trunk is too risky, and possibly too modern-day, but using his knife to sharpen and resharpen a chunk of wood is fine. It’s hard to tell with him. He’s made so many wedges because as far as Steve can pick out from all the swearing, the wood is too soft to hold enough of an edge to last.

Possibly because it’s wood, and not a knife.

Steve has not voiced any such opinion, and he has no plans to. That’s not a fight worth having. Not when he can go along with Bucky’s decisions and enjoy the stunning and exquisitely well-toned view along the way.

Bucky has the sixth of his wedges in one hand and a fist-sized rock in the other, and after scoring himself a path across the cut surface with his fuck-off knife— _that’s_ allowable, at least—to mark where he’s hoping to convince the wood to split, he’s twisting himself over that log and hammering the wedge into the wood, working his way backward toward Steve and sliding littler branches into the gap as he goes along so it doesn’t close after him.

It’s a glorious sight.

There’s his ass, of course, conveniently at head-height for Steve to admire and contoured by the light from their fire off to the side. But his thighs are looking mighty fine in those jeans, highlighted by the fact that those jeans are just about clinging to him while he works in this humidity and heat. 

And while he’s got what’s left of his boots on again for all this—like a sane person might, and Steve hadn’t even had to insist—he’s long-since abandoned his shirt. Steve had missed that happening, somehow. He must have looked down at his work too long, or been staring into space. Whatever it was that took his eyes off Bucky, it gave Bucky the time he needed to covertly strip off that bit of fabric, and Steve is as thankful as could be.

Because however much Bucky might hate putting on or taking off clothes with an audience, and however uncomfortable he might be about having eyes linger on his left shoulder once it’s out in the open, Steve knows beauty when he sees it. 

And there is beauty there, twisted into the skin alongside the scars. Beauty in the way his body refuses to back down but instead meets that metal head-on. Beauty in the way the outer plates move and shift, in their outermost edges gliding along that inner layer of plating that’s so much more delicate but not at all fragile.

And whenever Bucky stands up to roll his shoulders back and try to get his spine and back muscles to stop complaining, Steve gets to trade his ogling of Bucky’s backside for artistic appreciation of the artwork that is Bucky’s whole self, glistening with his efforts. The play of muscles under his skin, the edges and planes of him, the fault line raging along his scapula and the gentle curve of his lower back.

In a supremely unappreciated attempt at self-sacrifice—giving up a view like this, and voluntarily at that!—Steve had tried to convince Bucky to let him do the batoning. He knows his back can take it and not complain the next day. Or not complain the way Bucky’s will, what with all the screwy connections of metal to flesh, the internal rivets and joins, the wiring, the uneven weight.

But Bucky’s the expert at batoning, and not just by comparison to Steve. This horizontal work with wood that’s weird and a knife that’s not actually the right size for the job apparently makes it tricky even for him, so Steve can just go sit over there with the rock. The angles involved are one of the saner reasons he’d given for not using the knife in the first place. Too hard to be certain he could strike true, too easy to warp the blade or break it off clean. Steve suspects there’s also a healthy serving of “I know you’ll insist on using a knife and I’m not letting you fuck up my knives until I’m literally reduced to one arm.”

Said arm damage is an argument Steve suspects would have won him an opportunity to straddle that pine tree and do this particular task while Bucky directed him and specifically _didn’t_ sign himself up for a really miserable arm-overuse hangover. Steve could have brought that up. Maybe he should have. But coming from him, the reminder of their lack of maintenance supplies would be interpreted as coddling. 

And Bucky’d brought it up himself eventually. He’d insisted it would be okay when Steve made his first offer to handle the batoning, albeit _his_ way, with a knife. Bucky had insisted that he knew what it felt like to stray into “gonna break it” territory, and that… Steve grits his teeth. And that endurance exercises with HYDRA went _past_ the breaking point, not _to_ the breaking point, so he knew where the edges were on those cliffs and wasn’t about to let himself topple over the side.

His little laugh after that about how, worst case, Steve would get to “play nursemaid and shit” had not lightened Steve’s mood at all. But try changing Bucky’s mind. Just try it. That’s what failure feels like, right there.

Bucky’s at least giving himself breathers and stopping to stretch things out or walk his metal arm through what sounds like an unpleasantly thorough and mostly internal calibration session. Between that evidence of bare-minimum self-care and the admittedly stunning and distracting view, Steve has allowed that this bit of recklessness is what Bucky needs as much as Steve himself had needed to throw himself out of trees and risk a broken leg or worse.

Different strokes, he supposes. They’ve each of them got issues, little self-destructive tendencies and reckless pleasures. They’re each after a different sort of thrill, different sorts of risks, different things that make them feel alive. But for all of that, their differences dovetail as nicely as their strengths and weaknesses. 

Steve shrugs and drops his eyes to look at what he’s meant to be doing. Taking his own little breaks to succumb to the temptation to ogle his best guy is fine, but he _does_ have to get some grooves carved into these wedges, and then smooth out the edges of those grooves so the rope doesn’t catch and shred. He can be as thirsty as he wants as long as he also contributes to the task of the hour.

And the ear-worm is back. By the time he’s got his current groove carved and smoothed, Steve’s helplessly humming at full volume, that same song Bucky’d been whistling while he took a break from batoning earlier and threw himself into the task of charring the jagged ends of their logs smooth with a torch and some water. Because the world would _end_ if they used a knife to cut off the jagged bits.

It’s so familiar a song, and not just because Bucky was whistling it not two hours ago as the sun dropped down and their fire flared up. Catchy, light, even boisterous, but what? What is that song? It feels like it’s one of those songs that’s meant to be a joke, but he can’t be sure. Bucky was always a treasure trove of saucy and inappropriate songs back in their day, but it feels like a modern tune.

After another few minutes, Steve stops humming, sits up and frowns. “What _is_ that?” he asks. “The one you got stuck in my head. I know it but I can’t place it.”

Bucky continues his batoning, beating the wedge through the trunk with even, solid thwacks of the rock. He’s got a rhythm, a system, and perfect timing that hasn’t faltered yet and doesn’t falter now with Steve’s question. Caveman precision at its finest, as evidenced by the man with the finest, most stubborn ass in all of the Jurassic. 

“Monty Python,” he grunts. Thwack goes the rock, not missing a beat. “Lumberjack song.” Thwack. “Seemed appropriate.” 

“Yeah?” That’s it. How could he have lost track of that one? Tony’d been so proud when he had first played it for him, and so disappointed when Steve had laughed instead of being offended.

Bucky stands upright with a wince and a groan, leaving the wedge where it is, but letting the rock drop to the ferns at his feet. “Well, I’m a fucking prehistoric lumberjack, Steve, and I _am_ okay.” He runs a forearm across his brow and turns to face him, careful not to get his feet tangled up in the smaller branches and spent wedges littering his work area. 

“I’m more than okay,” he adds, no evidence in his voice of anything beyond playful boasting and a hint of breathlessness from exertion, though Steve knows he’s got to be hurting. “I am the _shit_.” 

Steve raises a dubious eyebrow and eyes him up and down consideringly. “I don’t know, Buck. Going to have to settle for jeans and hiking boots instead of women’s clothes and high heels, and that’s just not the same thing.” 

“Eh, I’m improvising.” Bucky gets the toe of his boot under the pounding rock and kicks it up like it’s a prehistoric hacky sack that he catches mid-rise. “Still a lumberjack.” He swings a leg back over the log and gets back to work with the wedge. Thwack. “Still the shit,” he calls over his shoulder.

Steve watches him make his way toward him, each thwack accompanied by the faint squeak of splintering wood as the wedge works its way along the length. “Maybe architect,” he suggests between thwacks. “You’re an _architect_ and you’re the shit, something something all this wood to split?” 

Bucky’s rhythm falters as he looks over his shoulder with a semi-piercing look. “You trying to make a song request, Steve?” 

“Well, I do have a front row seat.” Steve grins. “And I’m still a hottie, so the ticket’s free.” 

Bucky rolls his eyes and turns back to his work. “Gimme a sec,” he mutters. “These things don’t write themselves.” 

Steve keeps his grin as he moves on to the next log in need of grooves, this one big enough he does his legs the favor of not pulling it up onto his lap, but merely scoots it closer until his knees are touching it. There’s no telling what Bucky will come up with, or how long it’ll take him. And while he waits, he really does have a front row seat to the best show in town.

The lines of Bucky’s form, his legs in those jeans, his _ass_ in those jeans, the shimmer along his skin, the way his hair curls with sweat where it falls out of the strip of leather he’s got it tied up with. The flashing yellow and orange along the curve of his metal arm, flickering reflections of their fire. The muscles all up and down his back. The little huff of air as he drives the rock and wedge through the wood.

Bucky’s got a few more planks off of that log, kicked to the side as they come loose and then stacked as a group during a breather, in the time it takes Steve to dig out just one groove, what with all of Steve’s staring. And Steve doesn’t feel even a little bit guilty about slacking off. The view is just too good to miss.

Eventually, Bucky finishes resharpening all of his wedges and sheathes his knife. Instead of starting the next round, he comes over to sit down on the log Steve’s ostensibly working on, sits on it like it’s a park bench with a leg on each side of Steve, the inside curve of his feet resting against Steve’s hips. He folds his arms across his gleaming torso and shoots Steve a fake scowl as Steve drags his eyes upward. 

“Alright, you demanding little shit,” Bucky grumbles down at him. “Here you go. Don’t say I never gave you nothing.” He clears his throat. “ _Oh, I’m a carpenter, and I’mph—_ ”

Steve hauls him forward by the belt and interrupts him with the kiss that’s been building inside him too long—hours too long. Been building and building with every fluid movement, every rivulet of sweat, every breathless huff of effort from this man he loves. And no “lunch break,” no matter how sweet, could do more than stoke this fire in his gut.

Steve cuts him off with his lips, and Bucky doesn’t fight it but melts against him with a pleased groan and drops his arms between them to make quick work of Steve’s belt, his fingers against Steve’s belly a contrast of soft and hard, flesh and metal—but every finger eager, driven, purposeful, _successful_ as the buckle clinks open, the button slips loose, and those hands dive inside.

And yeah, Steve thinks, before he stops thinking entirely. This whole build-a-raft-together idea was _gold_.


End file.
